Bradley mulled it over for a moment longer as Cody turned for the accommodation block.
‘Leave it with me.’
*
Bethany walked across the ice toward the accommodation block with a series of hand-written notes clutched in her hand and an anxious expression on her face. Cody looked up at her as he crossed from the hangar.
‘You okay?’ he asked.
‘More bad news,’ she replied as she climbed the steps to the block and opened the door for him. ‘You and Jake both need to see this.’
They walked inside together to see Jake pulling on his jacket. Bethany set the paper down before them on the table.
‘What’s this?’ Jake asked.
Bethany sighed. ‘These are air samples taken over the last four months. I’ve collated them by hand using the sampling kits we’ve got left. Thankfully, they don’t need electricity.’
‘And? Cody asked.
‘Clearest data I’ve ever seen yet,’ Bethany replied. ‘All major pollutants have receded by as much as fifty per cent. That now includes some heavy metals as well as the usual suspects like Carbon Dioxide and Monoxide.’
Jake looked at Cody. ‘Industry’s definitely gone, then.’
‘Manufacturing, vehicles, everything,’ Cody nodded, a fresh pulse of fear inside as he considered this latest confirmation of their isolation. ‘A complete shutdown of the global economy, the end of fossil fuels, maybe even farming.’
‘Methane’s down too,’ Bethany confirmed. ‘A loss of cattle on a global scale could cause that kind of dip.’
Cody sighed in resignation. ‘It’s been months since the storm.’
‘And winter in the northern hemisphere,’ Jake added.
The conclusion was brutal in its simplicity.
‘The world’s never coming back,’ Bethany whispered. ‘It’s really over.’
Jake zipped up his jacket. ‘There’s no way they could rebuild infrastructure on that scale after so long. It’s likely most power stations have been abandoned, millions of miles of power lines fallen or corroded, essential drainage and waste disposal collapsed.’
‘That’s the other bad news,’ Bethany said, and pointed to one of the hand-written notes. ‘There have been faint pulses of some radioactive elements. Not sufficient for an exchange of nuclear weapons but… ’
Cody finished her sentence for her.
‘ …enough for the collapse of nuclear cooling systems, spent rods radiating energy out into the atmosphere across the world.’
‘Any danger to us here?’ Jake asked her. ‘From the fallout?’
‘No,’ Bethany replied. ‘The readings are not far above background.’
Jake looked at Cody, who shrugged his jacket back on.
‘I’m going to the radios again,’ he said. ‘It’s about all we’ve got left.’
*
Cody sat at the Signals Development Position inside Polaris Hall’s communications room, one hand on the digital frequency shift modulator.
The room had become his home from home over the past few months. Inside the building, with no windows in his direct line of sight, he had found himself encapsulated in a fantasy world where he could pretend that he was back at MIT, fiddling with computer analysis of chemicals or calculating gas spectrometry experiments.
The white-noise hiss in the earphones he wore for two hours at a time had metamorphosed from the flat-lining death knell of humanity into a blank canvas onto which he could place any sound he desired. Cody had sat for hours, slowly changing the frequencies by unthinking reflex as he imagined sudden contact from the outside world. The loss of communications had been temporary, an atmospheric aberration. Law and order had been restored. The airplanes were returning. He had imagined the joy their fractious group would share as the landing lights of the big Hercules aircraft appeared again in the sky. The journey home. Holding his beloved Maria for the first time in so long.
The news reports.
The novels and the movies.
The calling all stations please receive signal… Break… Alert Five….
Cody sat bolt upright in his seat as his warm, cosy daydream was shattered by the signal crackling through his headphones. He grabbed one of them instinctively in his hand and pressed it hard to his ear as he struggled to listen.
‘…… receive… any station, Aler… hear… cannot reach…’
Cody scrambled for the microphone transmit button and punched it down as he shouted down the line.
‘Unknown call sign, this is Alert Five, do you copy?’
A hiss of undulating static roared in Cody’s ears, then the crackling noise again.
‘… Alert Five… mess… ken… Prepare to… coordin… ver…’
‘Alert Five, say again! Repeat transmission!’
The featureless hiss returned, humming with emptiness. Cody sat in silence for what felt like an eternity, staring at the banks of instruments in front of him and wondering if he had imagined the voice he had heard. Surely he could not have gone insane?
The static in his ears burst with noise once more.
‘… sendin… range parameters… digi…orse Code…. Receive…’
Cody was about to reply when a sudden series of beeps and pops of noise filled the airwaves. Cody grabbed a pen and a piece of paper as he scrambled to write down the broadcast of what could only be Morse Code.
The broadcast lasted less than twenty seconds, repeated once, and then the band fell entirely silent.
Cody sat back in his chair and stared at the paper in his hand, filled with a line of mysterious dots and dashes that he had no idea how to translate.
***
11
‘We go now, damn it!’
Cody burst into the accommodation block and froze as Reece Cain swung a rifle to point directly at him.
Reece was standing with the rifle pulled into his shoulder and another slung across his back, tears streaming from his eyes as he held the entire team at bay. His thick black hair was plastered across his face as though he were looking out from between the bars of a cell. Cody slowly pushed the door shut behind him, cutting off the blast of frigid air as he looked at Bradley and Sauri and realised that neither of them were armed.
Cody looked at Jake. ‘What’s going on?’
Bradley answered, his fists clenched.
‘We went to the stores to draw our weapons to hunt, found this asshole there loading them up. Says it’s time to leave. I think he’s lost his marbles, you know what I mean?’
‘Shut up!’ Reece screamed and swung the weapon to point at Bradley.
‘Shove it, creep,’ Bradley snapped back.
Jake stared at Reece, seemingly unsure of what to do next. Cody stepped forward, put his hands out in front of him.
‘Easy Reece, what’s happened?’
Reece kept his eyes fixed on Bradley, glaring as though he could shoot the soldier with merely a look.
‘I’m going home. Give me the keys to the BV.’
Cody kept his hands up. ‘You can’t take the BV Reece. We need both vehicles because we won’t have enough fuel in one of them to reach…’
‘To hell with the fuel!’ Reece bellowed and swung the weapon to face Cody. ‘There’s no point! There’s nothing left out there. We’re all dead already!’
Cody felt a shiver of apprehension as he realised that Reece was making no sense. He was armed and beyond reason.
‘Then why leave at all?’ Cody asked, as gently as he could.
Reece shivered as he cried in short, sharp gasps. ‘I want to go home. I don’t want to die here.’
‘We don’t want to die here either,’ Cody pointed out. ‘And we might not have to.’
Cody kept his eyes on Reece as the rest of the team’s heads turned to look at him.
Cody spoke slowly. ‘I picked up a signal, a man’s voice, broadcasting.’
Jake was about to speak but Reece cut across him. ‘Bullshit! I’m not falling for it, Cody. I’m leaving an
d if you stop me I’ll shoot, you understand?’
Cody looked at Reece for a moment longer, then reached into his pocket and pulled out the keys to the BV. He tossed them down onto the table between them.
‘Fine. You go ahead. Save yourself.’
Reece stared at the keys through his bleary, tear stained eyes, and the rifle dropped briefly as he did so.
Bradley lunged forward, one solid forearm smashing the rifle’s barrel down to point at the ground as his right fist flashed through the air. It connected with Reece’s temple with a dull crack that made Cody wince. Reece’s head flicked sideways and the light in his eyes blinked out as quickly as the power had done months before.
Reece crashed onto the floor as Bradley yanked the rifle from his grasp and span it to point at his head.
‘No!’
Jake leaped forward and put himself between Bradley and Reece, shielding the scientist with his body.
‘He’s a liability!’ Bradley raged. ‘Let’s just finish him!’
Cody rushed forward and stood in front of Bradley.
‘He’s not a liability,’ he insisted. ‘He needs our help. You’re no good to us if you’re going to shoot anybody who cracks up.’
Bradley scowled and yanked the rifle up and away from Reece.
Cody stepped back as he looked down at Reece, who was slumped in Jake’s arms and weeping softly to himself, his face buried in his own shoulder.
‘Jesus, what set him off?’ Cody asked.
Jake shrugged helplessly.
‘The sunrise,’ Bethany guessed from behind Cody. ‘It’s got all of us riled.’
‘The hell with that,’ Bradley snapped. ‘What’s this about a broadcast? Were you just saying that to get this asshole to drop the rifle?’
Cody looked at them all.
‘No. I picked up a transmission, ultra high frequency. No idea what it was saying or where it came from.’
‘You didn’t talk to them?!’ Bradley demanded.
‘I could barely hear them,’ Cody shot back. ‘But they were there.’
‘Could have been from anywhere,’ Charlotte pointed out. ‘Maybe even some kind of artefact, bouncing around in the atmosphere from before the silence.’
‘No,’ Cody shook his head. ‘They tried to respond, I could tell. Couldn’t understand what they were saying though, it was such a weak transmission. I’m guessing it may have been direct, not through a satellite?’
‘Unlikely,’ Bradley pointed out. ‘It would take a hell of a powerful transmitter to get a signal all the way up here. What frequency were you on?’
‘Two five zero, decimal eight,’ Cody replied.
Bradley and Sauri exchanged a glance. ‘That’s a military waveband,’ Bradley said.
‘Doesn’t much matter,’ Jake said. ‘Somebody, somewhere, is alive.’
‘Damned right,’ Bradley said, ‘which means we’ve now got a good reason to get the hell out of here. You can argue all you want, old man, but I’m not spending another minute sitting on my ass waiting for the perfect spring day to pull out. I say we call a vote and put this to rest right now.’
‘You just threatened to shoot Reece because he wanted to leave!’ Bethany pointed out. ‘Now you want to go?’
‘I threatened him because he was aiming a rifle at me,’ Bradley snapped at her. ‘We all want out of here, right? It’s time.’
Jake stared at Bradley for a long beat and then looked across at the rest of the team.
‘You all feel this way?’
Cody saw Bethany and Charlotte both nod in rare agreement with Bradley. Bobby and Sauri both said nothing. Cody took his chance.
‘Fine, let’s just do it then. Who wants to leave within the next couple of days?’ he asked.
It felt like a betrayal, as though he were about to commit a crime, but Cody had no choice but to put his own arm in the air first. He saw Jake’s cragged features sag slightly, crestfallen, but did not make eye contact with the old man.
Bradley’s hand shot up into the air. Charlotte and Bethany looked at Jake, stricken with indecision. Bobby hesitated, uncertain.
Sauri slowly raised his arm in the air.
Then Charlotte followed suit.
‘Half and half,’ Jake said. ‘That’s not helping anybody.
Cody felt a pulse of consternation as he realised that the group was in danger of fracturing into two camps. He was about to speak when from behind the table where Reece was slumped down against the wall a pale hand rose up to be counted.
‘Five to three,’ Bradley grinned without warmth. ‘We’re done here.’
The balance of power had shifted from Jake to Bradley, and Cody knew that he was the cause. The soldier turned to him.
‘That signal you heard. You get a location on it, anything at all?’
A thousand thoughts flashed through Cody’s mind as he considered the man before him, and of what Sauri had told him. Bradley couldn’t be trusted. He shook his head.
‘I got nothing.’
Bradley glared at Cody. ‘You get the first contact we’ve had for five months and you don’t think to triangulate the source?’
‘I didn’t see you sitting up there at that station for hundreds of hours,’ Cody shot back, ‘might have been useful if you’d told us you knew how to work the equipment.’
Bradley ground his teeth in his jaw and he gripped his rifle tighter. ‘You record it?’
‘No.’
‘So it’s useless then,’ Bradley said. ‘Even if we get away from here we don’t have a clue where to go.’
‘We’ve got some idea,’ Cody replied. ‘Think about it. It’s been winter in the northern hemisphere. There’s no power. People who have survived long enough will have tried to migrate south, toward the equator. There’s no point in us heading for Canada or Quebec.’
‘So you’re saying that we just bypass them and head south, for America?’ Sauri asked.
‘I’m saying that we get clear of the snowline as quickly as possible,’ Cody replied. ‘The most likely place that electrical equipment might have survived is probably equatorial regions where the impact of the solar storm was at its weakest. It’s also where we’ll most likely find any survivors as their winter will have been less harsh than elsewhere.’
‘We can’t know that for sure,’ Jake cautioned. ‘I’m not saying you’re wrong, but it’s a big gamble to bypass the nearest settlements.’
‘There’ll be nothing at Eureka that we don’t already have, except fuel and maybe discarded equipment. The place wasn’t manned any more anyway. By running directly south we’ll save a hundred kilometres of travel. We should head for Grise Fjord.’
Bradley slung his rifle over his shoulder.
‘We can argue the toss about this on the way,’ he snapped. ‘Right now we’re wasting time. Who wants to help me load up the BV and get the hell out of here?’
Bradley didn’t wait for an answer. He turned and strode out of the block, pulling his hood up against the cold as he shoved the door open and disappeared.
Charlotte and Bethany followed him, Sauri and Bobby close behind. Cody waited until they had left before he looked across at Jake.
‘You sure you know what you’re doing?’ Jake challenged. ‘This could get us killed. It’s too soon.’
Cody didn’t answer as he left the block.
*
Bradley led the team at a breakneck pace in loading the BV, packing as many supplies and barrels of diesel fuel as they could fit into the trailer section. They worked in the hangar until late at night, and as the team slipped away to rest Cody offered to lock the hangar behind them.
‘I’m going to head to Polaris Hall before we leave,’ he explained. ‘See if I can pick up that signal again.’
Cody trudged alone to the building and upstairs to the Signals Development Position. He switched on the radios and slipped the headphones on. The gentle hiss of static filled his ears again, strangely comforting now.
Cody kicked hi
s chair back slightly from the desk and began rifling through a series of drawers. It took him only a couple of minutes to find what he was looking for.
He placed the small book on the table before him, and then from his pocket he fished the scribbled dots and dashes. Carefully, he began translating the coded message until he had a series of figures written before him.
42N70W
Cody looked at them for a long time before he finally folded the coordinates into the book. Then, he had a better idea. He sat back and read the numbers over and over again until he could recite them from memory.
Then he tore the paper into tiny shreds and stuffed them into his pocket. He shut down the radios and put his jacket back on before heading for the exit.
As he locked the door behind him and left Polaris Hall, he lifted the shredded paper from his pocket and let the pieces be taken by the buffeting wind whistling between the blocks. The sound of an engine roared above the gale and he whirled as a snowmobile rattled up alongside him.
‘What was that you just tossed?’
Bobby sat in the snowmobile’s saddle, his face in shadow within his thick hood.
‘Junk,’ Cody replied. ‘Where are you going?’
‘To Alert Five,’ Bobby replied. ‘Reece is out of commission, so I figured I can replace the distress beacons for him and then recharge the old one using the snowmobile’s battery. Once we get moving we can carry them with us, give people a way of tracking our position. If there’s somebody out there like you said, they might hear it.’
‘We don’t know that for sure, Bobby,’ Cody cautioned. ‘The signal was weak and…’
‘All the more reason to do it now,’ Bobby interrupted, ‘while they’re still maybe searching for us. We get it done, we’re golden. You want to risk leaving it until tomorrow?’
Cody looked out to the south, the horizon long lost to the darkness and the snowfall.
‘You sure you’ll be okay out there? Sauri said the polar bears will be hunting by now.’
‘I’ll overnight at the observatory if I have to. I can set up an arc light so you can home in on the station tomorrow, and we go from there. It’s worth it, Cody.’
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